This Haunted World Book Four: Rohaise: The Witch of Drumlin by Shani Struthers

Author:Shani Struthers [Struthers, Shani]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Authors Reach
Published: 2022-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

Trickster! Changeling! Heathen! Witch! Witch! Witch!

Before they touched me, there’d been words, words as cruel as their hands. Their terror, their hatred, was genuine – they truly saw me as something despicable. A woman who had helped their quarry escape, denying them the pleasure of tearing him apart. Who refused to talk, no matter what they threatened. Therefore, I could not be a woman but something other, evil. A certain irony in saying so, when it was love that held my tongue!

The light…the orb… Is it that which keeps me from sleeping? This light that continues to burn so stubbornly. If I am a witch, then it follows I am powerful, doesn’t it? Within me is the ability to extinguish the orb. I want the dark, only the dark, for in it there is nothing, just as there was nothing in the eyes of the king’s men, the soldiers, certainly no mercy.

“Where is Alexander? Where has he gone? Tell us, witch, if you want to live!”

No mercy, no light, and only lies spewing from their mouths.

They would not let me live. But what they could do was make my death harder. If I would not tell, I would suffer, and suffer dreadfully.

It was Alexander’s eyes that kept me strong, the way he looked at me, always.

‘You have entered my life, and suddenly the world is somewhere I want to be. Not full of fear and treason but the sweetest place. Because of you, Rohaise, it is heaven.’

Drumlin was heaven, with him and me in it, then it was hell, then it was…nothing. Limbo. But that limbo is no more because of the echoes, because of the orb, a light I focus on, willing it to disappear, to snuff itself out. Success! Once again there is darkness, me at the centre of it, not a witch or a heathen or a trickster, just nothing. Oh, if only I could sleep!

Red hair was another sign I was in league with the devil. An incubus, an acolyte, a scourge upon humanity.

“No natural woman could suffer this,” said one, tall and thin, his cheeks pockmarked.

He took a poker from the fire, one wrought in iron, and prodded me with it, sticking it in my side whilst demanding I speak. When I refused, he raised it high, then brought it down again, hard. I heard the crunch of bone in my arm as I tried to defend myself. He heard it too. Tossing the poker aside, he grabbed that same arm and twisted it, causing me to wail, to scream, to pass out. Darkness again, such a comfort but so fleeting!

My hair was ripped out, great clumps of it, my head held in an iron vice as it was parted, a blade taken to it as well. Blood that flowed just as red, staining white skin crimson.

“There she is!” declared another. “That’s more like it. Rohaise in her natural state, that consorts with the devil, that covets him. A filthy creature, she is an

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